Todd Cherry Ph.D.

There are 36 included publications by Todd Cherry Ph.D.:

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
The acceptability of efficiency-enhancing environmental taxes, subsidies and regulation: An experimental investigation 2011 2323 Public opposition to efficiency-enhancing policies is a significant barrier to addressing many environmental challenges. We use a market experiment to explore the acceptability of three types of instruments: Pigouvian taxes and subsidies, and quantit...
Aggregation Bias in the Economic Model of Crime 2002 1937 This paper uses county-level panel data to test the appropriateness of the ‘one size fits all’ reduced-form regression approach commonly used when estimating the economic model of crime. Empirical results provide initial evidence that previous studie...
The appropriation of endogenously provided common-pool resources 2013 1526 Because game theory suggests that the origin of a common-pool resource should not affect appropriation behavior, experimental studies of appropriation from common-pool resources generally presume resources are exogenously provided. However, behaviora...
Are Preferences for Skewness Fixed or Fungible 2003 1222 Are individual preferences for skewness fixed or fungible? Using preference reversals as a case study, we find evidence that preferences remained stable as reversals disappear due to arbitrage across both market-like and non-market contexts.
Climate Change Impacts On Crop Yield: Evidence From China 2014 1394 When estimating climate change impact on crop yield, a typical assumption is constant elasticity of yield with respect to a climate variable even though the elasticity may be inconstant. After estimating both constant and inconstant elasticities with...
Conditional Cooperation on Three Continents 2008 933 We show in a public goods experiment on three continents that conditional cooperation is a universal behavioral regularity. Yet, the number of conditional cooperators and the extent of conditional cooperation are much higher in the United States than...
Cooperation in and out of markets: An experimental comparison of public good games and markets with externalities 2013 1787 Experimental studies have compared cooperation across different nonmarket social dilemma settings, but the experimental literature has largely overlooked comparing cooperation across market and nonmarket settings. This paper reports the results from ...
Costly Coasean Bargaining and Property Right Security 2005 1547 This paper examines how transaction costs affect Coasean bargaining with secure and insecure property rights in the lab. Consistent with the theory that secure property rights lowers the cost of non-cooperation, we find that bargaining eficiency is i...
The development and deployment of low-carbon energy technologies: The role of economic interests and cultural worldviews on public support 2014 2044 Large-scale deployment of low-carbon energy technologies is crucial to mitigating climate change, and public support is an important barrier to policies and projects that facilitate deployment. This paper provides insights to the origins of public op...
Do Policymakers Locate Prisons for Economic Development? 2001 1734 While public goods can provide an overall increase in welfare, ‘inferior’ public facilities produce externalities specifically impacting host locations. Heterogeneous jurisdictional attributes, however, can cause net social benefits to vary across po...
Do you not like Pigou, or do you not understand him? Tax aversion and revenue recycling in the lab 2011 3493 Tax-aversion reduces the likelihood that price rationing can be a politically viable tool for environmental protection. We examine the case of the classic Pigouvian tax to control a negative externality, and consider how recycling the revenues, label...
Endogenous Context In A Dictator Game 2016 876 The early characterization of humans as narrowly self-interested agents has unraveled in recent decades due to advances in the behavioral sciences. There is convincing evidence that peoples’ preferences and decisions are shaped by their relationship ...
Endogenous Minimum Participation in International Environmental Agreements: An Experimental Analysis 2014 581 Almost all international environmental treaties require a minimum number of countries to ratify the treaty before it enters into force. Despite the wide-spread use of this mechanism, little is known about its effectiveness at facilitating cooperation...
Enforcing Compliance with Environmental Agreements in the Absence of Strong Institutions: An Experimental Analysis 2012 2249 This paper uses laboratory experiments to evaluate the performance of a deposit-refund mechanism used to enforce compliance with voluntary public-good commitments made in the absence of strong regulatory institutions. With this mechanism agents decid...
Examining The Role Of Fairness In High Stakes Allocation Decisions 2008 1707 Experimental evidence has prompted a debate over the nature of utility functions in which people are concerned about the amount others earn. We examine this issue by examining behavior across three variants of the dictator game. Using data from 195 d...
GDP: No one metric can rule them all 2014 1398 No abstract available.
“Green Fluff”? The Role Of Corporate Sustainability Initiatives In Effective Climate Policy 2015 265 Schendler and Trexler express concern that a small number of corporations cannot solve the global change problem, and neither can a small number of countries. We do not disagree, but meaningful progress does not need a fully comprehensive approach. F...
Heterogeneity, Coordination and the Provision of Best-Shot Public Goods 2013 1872 In a best-shot public good, where the provision level is determined by the highest contribution instead of the sum of all contributions, there is potential for waste and underprovision due to coordination failure. These failures are exacerbated when ...
The Impact of Endowment Heterogeneity and Origin on Public Good Contributions: Evidence From the Lab 2005 3481 Recent experimental research suggests that unpredicted behavior in the lab may result from endowment distribution and origin. We design an experiment to explore the impact of heterogeneous endowments and earned endowments on observed contributions in...
The Impact Of Trial Runs On The Acceptability Of Environmental Taxes: Experimental Evidence 2014 1641 This paper examines the political difficulty of enacting welfare-enhancing environmental taxes. Using referenda in a market experiment with externalities, we investigate the effect of trial periods on the acceptability of two theoretically equivalent...
Individual and Institutional Determinants of the Male Female Wage Gap Among U.S. Economics Faculty 2011 616 This paper provides new evidence on the male female wage gap in academia. Using unique data from the economics discipline, we estimate a human-capital based model to explore the nature of wage differentials among male and female economics professor...
Laboratory Testbeds and Nonmarket Valuation: The Case of Bidding Behavior in a Second-price Auction with an Outside Option 2004 1446 Researchers now use the lab to examine the behavioral underpinnings of valuation before the field application which some argue has less experimental control. But lab valuation work raises its own set of concerns when it uses private goods to explore...
Mental Accounting and Other-Regarding Behavior: Evidence from the Lab 2001 2229 This paper uncovers a key determinant of the other-regarding behavior that permeates bargaining experiments. Examining a one-shot dictator game that has the first-mover dictate the split of an amount of money, dictators acting over earned money exhib...
Pigouvian Tax Aversion and Inequity Aversion in the Lab 2010 1131 We use an experimental market with externalities to test whether inequality aversion could help explain the popularity of earmarking tax revenues. We find that voter opposition is not fully explained by material self-interest: Results indicate that...
The Prospects For Paris: Behavioral Insights Into Unconditional Cooperation On Climate Change 2016 871 Recent survey evidence from the United States suggests that most Americans support domestic policies to address climate change, and this support is not conditional on other countries’ commitment levels. The finding is somewhat perplexing because clim...
Rationality Crossovers 2007 838 Herein we further explore whether the power of arbitrage to induce people to exhibit more rational behavior extends to diverse decision-making tasks and stated valuation over preferences for gambles. We examine how arbitrage in a preference reversal ...
Rationality Spillovers 2003 755 We design an experiment to test whether the rationality that is induced by market-like discipline spills over to nonmarket valuation settings—a rationality spillover. Our results confirm that this new phenomenon exists. The rationality stimulated by ...
Self-Interest, Sympathy And The Origin Of Endowments 2008 1721 We explore whether the recent laboratory findings that suggest the origin of endowment matters in simple bargaining games are actually due to contextual shifts of relative effort and deservingness. Results support previous findings of endowment origi...
Sharing As Risk Pooling In A Social Dilemma Experiment 2015 1164 In rural economies with missing or incomplete markets, idiosyncratic risk is frequently pooled through informal networks. Idiosyncratic shocks, however, are not limited to private goods but can also restrict an individual from partaking in or benefit...
Sleeping with the enemy: The economic cost of internal environmental conflicts 2010 1707 This paper extends the literature on collective rent-seeking by introducing the possibility that a competing group may be a subset of another. We develop a model that incorporates the potential for some individuals to be party of both sides of a conf...
Social programs as positive inducements for tax participation 2012 868 A significant amount of non-compliance with the personal income tax is due to individuals who have not filed a tax return and so who are not “in the system”. We use experimental laboratory methods to examine the effect of positive inducements for fil...
Taxpayer information assistance services and tax compliance behavior 2010 2239 The traditional “enforcement” paradigm of tax administration views taxpayers as potential criminals, and emphasizes the repression of illegal behavior through frequent audits and stiff penalties. However, an important trend in tax administration poli...
Voting, Punishment, and Public Goods 2007 1054 Researchers have found that voting can help increase voluntary contributions to a public good—provided enforcement through a third party. Not all collective agreements, however, guarantee third-party enforcement. We design an experiment to explore wh...
Why Do People Oppose Solutions To Climate Change? 2015 255 Climate change gridlock is not from the absence of promising actions. It is a result of social and political failures. CICERO research is working to break this gridlock by showing how to overcome the barriers.
Willingness To Accept Local Wind Energy Development: Does The Compensation Mechanism Matter? 2016 1785 Wind power development projects often include compensation for the affected communities, but little is known about the efficacy of the alternative compensation mechanisms. This study addresses this question by examining the relative potential of priv...
Willingness To Pay For A Green Energy Program: A Comparison Of Ex-Ante And Ex-Post Hypothetical Bias Mitigation Approaches 2007 3180 The most persistently troubling empirical result in the contingent valuation method literature is the tendency for hypothetical willingness to pay to overestimate real willingness to pay. Two approaches, ex-ante and ex-post, have been developed to mi...